This is a very clever article. I suggest further research into whether vote-rings are actually indicative of product teams and founders with strong networks who they are able to motivate to support them. It may be that up votes from voting rings are just as useful (or perhaps more) in determining the likelihood of success of a product.
This is/was a problem on Stack Overflow (retired mod here). Work colleagues in the same office or company upvoting each other's questions or answers. You could often tell it was fairly innocent from the activity on their accounts (active, positive participation, asking and answering with reasonably good posts) and from the spread of votes (lots of upvotes given to/from unrelated users outweighing their votering count).
But sometimes the votering detection would ring bells and when contacted these users had genuinely not considered what they were doing was creating a votering, yet were willing to understand the problem at hand and back off from each other a bit.
I'm the admin for one of the rare instance of Stack behind a corporate firewall, which doesn't have votering detection - I've noticed this happening among a few co-located sprint teams. I created a d3.js Sankey Diagram to show the volume of people voting for other people and posted it on the site to let the community discuss it and it died down.
To valee's point though. I also believe collusion ratings could be found very high in cases where this is not a "voter ring" issue, but more an issue of who has a better network and/or is better at marketing.
Take Amy Hoy for instance (at least some people here on hacker news will know who she is). She has more than 16,000 followers on Twitter right now. I have 79 followers. She is good at marketing and it must have taken time for her to build up all of those followers. If she were to put several products on Product Hunt and I were to put up competitive products to each of those and we both tweeted about our Product Hunt posting naturally she will get more upvotes. Some of these upvotes will likely come from the same people, some of her most fanatical loyal customers.
To the algorithm this might look like collusion/voting ring, but it is just some basic and completely ethical marketing.
I'm not saying the voting ring problem doesn't exist, but that the question of "is this ethical" is one that is more difficult to answer than this algorithm. I think the developers who ran this collusion algorithm must agree with this to some extent, otherwise there would be no reason to pseudo-anonymize the results.
To give an example. If I were to create fake accounts and then do some type of automated up-voting system for my own posts; in my mind that is clearly unethical behavior.
If I announce to my existing customers that I have posted something and they go of their free accord and up-vote this is clearly ethical behavior.
If I ask my existing customer/friends/family to go up-vote me I believe this falls into a grayer area, but I would personally say this too is unethical.
Ok but why is ethics the most important consideration here? The consideration for the community is that the quality of the links is good and whether ethical or not, posting everything publicly and having THE SAME people be in the first 10 upvotes means there is a system that takes quality of the article into account less than the identity of the submitter, and it's been doing this over and over.
So ethics may be not the important question here, for the community.
So I think there are (at least) a couple of separate issues here.
1) Is Something ethical marketing tactics.
This is mostly what I was trying to address. If something is the result of ethical marketing then I'm of the opinion, "We'll allow it!" The reason for this being that "the better product" will fail if marketing is poor; and so people are typically better off going with an inferior product that survives.
2) Is Product Hunt allowing/perpetuating voter rings?
I think this goes to your issue of, "THE SAME people be in the first 10 upvotes". Honestly I'm not sure, but I do think Product Hunt's model is flawed. I think this message on Product Hunt alone gives some indication to the problem,
"Product Hunt is a community of product enthusiasts. Submissions are accepted by our most active members, specifically those that have been invited by others in the community."
It is an invite only, non open community. So in a certain sense the entire site is one giant voter ring; we all can vote, but we can't submit. So all voters are limited to voting on products from those deemed worthy by Product Hunt of posting in the first place.
If we were to contrast this with Eduhunt.co (same as Product Hunt, but targets only educational products) it is an open community that allows anyone that registers to post.
